The Devil You Know (And Other Things That Go Bump in the Night)
by narcolepticbadger
Summary: Regina has known her share of demons (she has been one), and she has much to hate, much to fear, on this night when the rest of the world masks their faces and laughs at death. OQ & Hood-Mills family Halloween fic. Rated for smut.


She has known her share of demons (she has _been_ one), and she has had much to hate, much to fear, on this night when the rest of the world masks their faces and laughs at death.

And that current runs so deep, blood-deep, even in the sick-bright lighting of the costume aisle, that Regina can't suppress the tiny shudder that travels down to her stomach when Robin dangles two packages in front of her nose and asks, "What do you think: glow-in-the-dark skeleton or evil jack-o'-lantern?"

One eyebrow is cocked with amusement, and Regina buys time with a playfully skeptical look of her own while she works on unlocking her tongue, all the while hoping Robin was too distracted by the color and flash of the decorations around them to notice anything amiss.

The Enchanted Forest had its own rituals that come with the turn of the harvest, but this was the first Halloween Robin and Roland would experience, and they were both flush with the excitement of it.

"And give Roland nightmares?" she says at last, thinking that bonfires and mummers plays are quite a different matter than haunted houses for a young boy and grateful to have so easy an excuse to reach for.

Robin's smile turns crafty, and he nudges his chin to where the boys stand in the aisle behind her, Henry and Roland examining bottles of fake blood and rubber bats, and Roland's curious fingers skimming over the plastic of Captain America's shield with an expression of pure wonder, as if he were handling something sacred.

"I think he'll sleep rather soundly tonight, don't you?"

She scowls at him, beaten by the natural fearlessness of a child, and Robin is all innocence and charm when he steps closer and lowers his mouth to her ear, teasingly. "But perhaps _you_ object at the sight of such a fearsome thing?"

It seems for a heavy moment that he's going to make a joke about things that go bump in the night (Regina has half a mind to say it herself, remembering the pleasant soreness in her back where Robin had pressed her against the kitchen cabinets in pursuit of her not two days ago) and then softens, his eyes crinkling with a question unspoken and the decorations abruptly lowered, dropped back onto the shelf with a dull sound.

She huffs, picks them up and makes Robin help her hang them properly, and angles close enough to him in the process to mutter, low and suggestive, "Please. If it's a scare you want, thief, I have more than one trick up my sleeve that will make your toes curl."

His fingers skate over the line of her thumb, find her wrist, and begin to lift away the fabric of her coat with aching slowness – and _how_ could his touch there be so quickly echoed under her belly?

"This sleeve here?"

They're on volatile ground, Regina knows, doesn't dare to meet his gaze, and just as she wonders if she needs to remind him that children – _their_ children – are present, he retreats, settles for an arm slung low around her waist.

She might have believed she had gotten away with it, her uneasiness with the trappings of Halloween passing unnoticed, if not for the way Robin's thumb kept soothing over the ridge of her lowest rib, how he turned her into him just enough to ghost a kiss over her temple, all of it intimating a certain understanding, a circle of protection spun for her alone.

They leave the store laden down with enough candy to feed a small army, and two boys (one practically bouncing in anticipation of the next day and the other ambling stoically beside him – though not entirely able to chase the last glint of excitement from his face, so telling to a mother's eye), and nothing more than a bit of cobwebbing to string across the front porch, tame enough that Regina suspects even Archie will manage to outdo them this year.

…

With Roland and Robin, they revive traditions Regina hasn't thought about in years – not that Henry has quite outgrown them, but there had been the…estrangement, and too many crises and portal jumps and lost memories to follow that a few holidays had passed unmarked by all.

They spend the evening carving pumpkins – what should have been done days ago, had she remembered the season better and without Henry's eventual prompting, and how would Robin and Roland know to ask? Roland leans elbow-deep into his and holds up gutty hands with delight, and Henry feints at her with arms spread for a messy hug that she stops in its tracks with a half-threatening, "Don't _even_ …" that makes him grin.

Robin wields the knife for Roland's pumpkin, tongue peeking out at the corner of his mouth as he listens to his son's imperious commands until they have a (lopsided) toothy grimace and slatted eyes to line up next to Henry's angular vampire fangs and her own cutting of witch and broomstick silhouetted against the moon – to which Robin mutters, darkly, "Show off," and refuses to sweeten even when she tickles the shell of his ear with a kiss.

And for a moment Regina forgets the disquiet rising through her gut as the candlelight in each pumpkin flickers, but it returns like a draught that no one but her feels, and even huddling closer to Robin doesn't ease the little hairs standing to attention on the back of her neck.

She thinks of children wearing paper faces, capering through the streets, and it's all innocent fun that never fails to makes her twitch, screwing eyes shut and seeing, always _seeing_ , her hand on a blood-red heart and a thousand throats closing as she nooses magic around them and herself bound, burning against the stake, and screaming high into the night when they catch her at last and demand fair (as if such a word even _existed_ for her) recompense.

...

For a few years, Henry had needed her enough that she could bury her terrors to live _that_ life, the one that was well protected from the reach of her past. Breakfast cereal and homework and bedtime stories, each one delaying the quickening of her heart that came with the hours she spent alone, in darkness. She couldn't deny the relief she found when he begged for one more story or when she crept down the hall, shaking, to listen to the patterns of his breathing and reassure herself that she was alive, and _he_ was alive, and that was everything important to her now.

She had compromised for Henry, always: candying apples for his class and dutifully leading him from door to door and letting him eat more chocolate than she approved of before bed, but Regina had fallen into her own exhausted and sleepless, frightened despite the strength of the walls around her.

(She remembered Henry dressed in a sheet, _ooo_ ing and _boo_ ing around the house with gleeful abandon, and how she'd bitten her tongue not to snap at him because she knew ghosts to be silent, tongueless in their visitations, and she would not have her son speak for them, she would _not_ let her one good thing give voice to the accusations of all who had come before him.)

And then everything (the clock, the curse) had broken, and Henry had gone, and so had begun her last and most terrible haunting.

Regina had been alone when Daniel and her mother returned from the dead, nightmares made corporeal, and there had been new blood on her hands and damnation in her son's (in everyone's) eyes with each tentative step she made, and, in the end, had she been relieved or wrecked when the last of the people who had loved her fell to ash again?

Alone, and sometimes grateful for the coldness and the ghosts that walked freely through her house (her life) because emptiness, at least, was something she knew how to manage, better than half-meant dinner invitations and trust torn away as easily as a spider's web.

Henry – eventually – came back.

And Robin and Roland came, and noise replaced the loneliness of Saturday mornings, everything made brighter simply by their _being_ , but she could not forget, would not deny herself the bitter medicine of her sins, and this night of all nights least of all.

The dead visited her in the night, still, even with Robin at her back and draped languidly across her legs, even with two boys down the hall that brought light and air and earth back into the house, and she suspected this was her lot – witnessing them, these people she had erased from every history except her own. She was the one who kept them real, and, despite what the books said, there was nothing beautiful about keeping certain people alive in your heart.

It was the nameless, faceless ones who might yet destroy her. She would never remember how she wronged them, and, once, that was a comfort, but now… now she felt careful eyes upon her and no answers for them, absolution impossible (she told herself) when their lives had never been important enough to her to quantify in the first place.

...

Regina counts shadows as Robin breathes steady beside her, watches them multiply against the ceiling like a game of shadow-animals, except instead of rabbits and wolves she sees – well, things _worse_ , though the hunting for her pulse, for her death, could be the same.

She flips the blanket back and frees herself of the tangle of sheet and Robin's feet over hers, and she pads downstairs for a glass of water (needing something stronger, perhaps), pausing only to look in on Henry and Roland to once more seek calm in the sleep of others.

Sipping from a mug she droops over the kitchen sink, and Robin comes to her with a fox-light step, his presence made known, just, with a gentle hum from his throat before he moves to reach for her.

He traces the tension in her shoulders, sweeps the curtain of hair away from her neck to lay a series of kisses there, and Regina relaxes into it, feels his answering smile, and sounds her reproval when he pulls back to offer her, of all things, a miniature candy bar from their Halloween supply.

"Good after a fright, I hear. Restorative properties and all that," he says.

There's a thickness to his voice that implies he's been tasting his way through the bag, and suddenly he's so young in the moonlight she wants to laugh at him – her sometimes graceless thief – but she accepts what's offered and bites into caramel and cookie and thinks that the sugar (Robin's sweetness, too) really _does_ help.

"Oh? You _are_ planning on saving some for the kids, right?"

"Merely checking the quality of the chocolate, milady. Do you doubt it?"

Robin rocks slightly from side-to-side, hands now deep in the pockets of his sweatpants, and she wonders (suddenly feeling herself cold under the thinness of her pyjamas) if it's chill or want that pricks gooseflesh along his arms, and – she bites her lip, and he cocks his head in response, knowing – oh, how she might warm him.

Regina's the one to lead them back to the bedroom, barely through the doorframe before Robin finds the buttons of her top and kisses between her breasts, she swallowing a moan until he kicks the door closed behind them with one clumsy heel. He trails his tongue to one nipple and circles there, nipping at the skin above gently when she squirms in protest, and she butts her forehead against his shoulder in rebuke before searching lower, intent on winning her own satisfaction.

She drops a hand below his waistband (these sweatpants she has a mind to steal someday, for all she'll swim in them), feels his arousal and how it responds to her lightest touch, the quick change in his breathing when she runs firmer over his length. The rhythm of his kisses breaks suddenly against her neck, she bares her teeth in victory to have him panting so soon, his aim made sloppy as she increases the pressure and speed of her ministrations.

They wander, he nudging and she tugging until they're spread across the bed, sideways, his legs dangling over the far edge, and she's tempted to turn around to check if his toes are curling yet. But he rolls her onto her back and dips his head between her legs, and Regina forgets about that line of her challenge entirely, greedy for the attention of his mouth and straying into an exquisite, endless sense of anticipation that leaves her twisting in the sheets and opening every inch of herself to him.

Her pleasure spikes and ebbs, untold time lost between, and when she finds strength in her fingers again, Regina guides Robin back to eye-level and kisses him – and it's not _enough_ , not nearly, for the wildness of desire coursing through her.

She teases down his body by touch alone (not sure she can trust her vision any further, blown apart as it is) and feels him ready, moaning under her hand and, soon, her mouth. Long, lazy strokes of tongue prolong his pleasure, cord his neck with muscle as he loses his restraint in increments, and she's hungry for it, for him, and knows Robin a creature just as ravenous.

There's an edge to the way he grits _Regina_ as though he would curse her if he could find the words – if he could find the breath – and so let him curse her and revere her properly, then.

She slides up to meet his hips with hers, everything slick between them, hands working over each other's baredness as they fight for release, as they give, and they climax together, both crying out with senseless syllables that sound the purest sort of music to her.

Regina is suddenly slumping over his chest, down to the mattress beside him, weak, so weak, and shatteringly grateful for it, for this slender moment of rest.

In time they right themselves in the bed, discovering pillows again, and Robin combs lazily through her hair, fingers moving slower and slower until they still as he drifts off. Regina keeps hold of his arm, heavy against her side, and sometimes she bends to kiss a knuckle, or the vein that lies clear across the back of his hand – a silly thing, she knows, but she _loves_ him, this man who knows demons too but refuses to balk at hers.

He has taken her heart and holds it within the walls of his own, within the walls of his hands, and, even if her demons are no quieter for it, his is the only safekeeping that she needs.

…

It surprises her a little less every time Robin slips his arms around her from behind, but she never wants to lose that sense of wonder, that sense of _love_ that runs deeper than the fear, at his touch.

He does it now, as they watch Henry lead Roland – Chewbacca and an over-enthusiastic Han Solo, she should say, and when did Henry get so tall? – up the stepping stones to another neighbor's house.

His hands come circling around her waist, and she leans into him, and they are _together_ in every sense of the word.

They stand fast as Henry and Roland race past them, laughing and scrunching their noses at the display of affection, and Robin meets their challenge by spinning her in his arms and landing an open, unapologetic kiss on her while the boys shriek off in search of more sweets.

"Boo," he whispers, as he scrapes past her neck, all coarseness, and Regina quivers with all she has never allowed herself to hope for.

She believes.


End file.
